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A bust of an ending: No excuses for Bruins' early exit

Whatever you want to call the unceremonious ending to the Bruins' season, know that the safest bet is to call it a shame.

There is absolutely no way of justifying how the Bruins -- even without Dennis Seidenberg -- could fall short of reaching the Eastern Conference finals. Really, they should have been a shoo-in for the Cup finals, but considering that injuries happen in the playoffs, the conservative expectation was conference finals or bust.

Bust it was.

The Bruins were the best team in the NHL this regular season, yet when it came time to play their best game after treading water for six games against a challenging Montreal team, they failed to show up.

Now, rather than being one of the great Bruins teams this town has had the privilege of paying a lot of money to go see, they're the latest paper tiger thrown onto the pile of Presidents' Trophy winners that didn't rise to the occasion to win something bigger.

"Any time you finish first in the league you expect to go far, but we had a lot of depth this year and a lot of really good players and guys were playing right, playing consistent," a dejected Brad Marchand said Wednesday night. "It had everything to be a good team but we just weren’t able to capitalize on it."

This wasn’t a case of an old, worn and weary team running out of gas. This was an expensive Mercedes with plenty of gas that was about to get topped off at the next exit with Seidenberg a decent bet to return during the Eastern Conference finals.

So how did it go wrong? Yes, they ran into the Canadiens, but they are a better team than the Canadiens. Montreal presented a bad matchup: a speedy, opportunistic bunch that blocked shots and got sticks on enough passes to drive the Bruins batty. Carey Price made no mental errors while Tuukka Rask had at least a couple.

But if the Bruins were even close to the top of their game, if their best forwards – specifically David Krejci’s line five-on-five -- cashed in on the countless opportunities they were still able to create, if Brad Marchand scored a goal the entire playoffs, if they didn’t let Montreal carry the play in the first 15 minutes of Game 7 and so many other points, this series wouldn’t have lasted seven games, let alone ended the Bruins season.

Big-picture-wise, the defense is what ultimately led to the Bruins' demise. Boston's young blueliners -- specifically Matt Bartkowski and Kevan Miller -- got worse as the series went on.

Both players had crucial errors that gave the Canadiens early goals in the last two games -- Miller in Game 6 and Bartkowski in Game 7 -- while Miller took himself out of the play to go for a hit in the second period of Game 7 on a play that would eventually lead to a Max Pacioretty goal.

"You always try to get better as the series went on. I don’t think this was the case for us," Rask said. "As far as [defense] goes, I think the last two games we made some uncharacteristic mistakes, and that ended up costing us the series. It’s not that it’s anybody’s fault but, you know, it’s just we couldn’t take the next step as a team and raise our game."

It's a tough break that the Bruins' young defense failed them, but those were their guys, and they were the guys that were there as they went on their late-season run that established just how much better than everyone else the Bruins were. The storyline that surrounded those players was that the silver lining of Dennis Seidenberg's absence and Andrew Ference's departure was the fact that it allowed the Bruins to get their young promising defenders regular minutes and an opportunity to come into their own.

Bartkowski was the reason the Bruins thought their defense could get by when they weren't able to score a legitimate top-four defender at the trade deadline. Even with Bartkowski's struggles after returning from the flu in the first round (he was benched for Games 2 and 3 of the Habs series), the Bruins deemed him a better option than Andrej Meszaros, the team's trade deadline acquisition who served as a good depth option, but not a strong option for play on the second pairing.

So you can be bummed that Bartkowski and Miller just didn't hold up the way the Bruins wanted them to, but the Bruins were still supposed to be better defensively than most other teams; they were certainly expected to be better defensively than either of the teams they met in the postseason.

We'll find out what kind of ailments these guys were dealing with once the team meets with the media for breakup day on Friday, but aside from maybe Zdeno Chara, who just looked weak in the final two games of the series, this hardly was the physical struggle that the 2013 Bruins had to endure.

The Bruins would have been greatly favored to beat the Rangers. Then factor in that Seidenberg probably would have entered the fold in a very winnable series. The road was paved for this team – one that saw itself as a Cup team – to make a deep enough run to agree with how good it was on paper and how good it could have been with one of its best players returning.

"I think if we would have gotten through Montreal here it would have been a very good position," Marchand said Wednesday night. "I mean, Seids coming back and we’re feeling good, big Game 7 win, but we didn’t."

When this Bruins team won seven of its first nine games in the regular season, the sense was that they hadn’t scratched the surface. When they went on a 12-game win streak in March, Milan Lucic infamously said he hoped the team wasn’t peaking too early.

As it turns out, the Bruins never really got to see just what their peak was, how they could do with one of those teams out West. They didn’t give themselves that chance.

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